Amy Newman's poetry workshop

Amy Newman's previous two poetry collections, Order, or Disorder and Camera Lyrica, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize and the Beatrice Hawley Award, respectively. In her fascinating new collection, fall, each of the 72 different definitions of the word engenders a poem. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and is currently a professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Take a look at her exercise on ekphrasis.

The painter's eye follows relation out. His work is not to paint the visible, He says, but to render visible.

I love these lines, which open Howard Nemerov's poem 'The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House'. They suggest that the artist doesn't copy, he creates. I especially admire how Nemerov uses painters (in this case, Paul Klee and Paul Terence Feeley) to discuss this process. It's one of many wonderful ekphrastic poems.

Ekphrasis is defined as the technique by which one artist responds to another, specifically as a verbal response to the visual or plastic arts. I like to think that the challenges of representing the world are shared throughout artistic mediums, with each artist wondering: how do I put the world into paint (or words), and how do I preserve its energy, animation, and spirit? Simply put: whatever it is that attracts me to the world, how can I make that happen on paper?

In John Keat's "Ode to a Grecian Urn", the poet's encounter with an engraved urn leaves him struck by the struggle to represent life and the distinctions between static clay and the flux of living:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Which was enough for his purpose: his image Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle. The time of day or the density of the light Adhering to the face keeps it Lively and intact in a recurring wave Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.

At the same time, Ashbery wonders at the limits of composition that maintain that vivid representation of the soul in the paint:

The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?

Ekphrasis can include description of the art, or it can include enactment of the encounter in art. Sometimes it includes analysis, not only of what is seen, but of how and why such a subject is particular to the writer's/speaker's existence. That the torso in Rainer Maria Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" is headless means the poet moves beyond mere looking, is forced to consider the generating force of the sculpture itself, and such a recognition of art's abilities and responsibilities nearly overwhelms the speaker, so that that poet's response to the statue that so mesmerizes him becomes a kind of artistic imperative:

here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

Both William Carlos Williams and WH Auden respond to Pieter Brueghel's painting, Fall of Icarus, the painting itself an artistic response to the myth of the overreaching boy. Williams tries to re-present the landscape as Brueghel painted it: plentiful with human action but indifferent to the tragedy of the fallen child.

unsignificantly off the coast there was

a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning

Auden's ekphrastic response-poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts", includes the poet's sense of Brueghel as artist, one who understands that suffering is compounded by our history of loss. The poem begins:

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Though he too describes the landscape as Brueghel has painted it, Auden filters the painting through his emotional understanding, his recognition similar to that of the Old Masters: suffering exists as a consequence of the human condition; it happens somewhere everyday, and to attend to every instance of suffering is, tragically, impossible.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

How the two responses are different! And yet similar: both Williams and Auden begin with the moment of observing, apprehending in the painting that which speaks to them, and then consider Brueghel's challenges, as well. In both cases the poets seem finally to know exactly what they wish to say. I guess you can say the same about Thom Gunn's wonderful "In Santa Maria del Popolo", the poet's encounter with the painter Caravaggio's The Conversion of Saint Paul, but what is most lovely is that part of what Gunn wishes to express is the uncertainty the painting stirs in him, his question not only about its techinique but about its subject, the possilbity of faith itself:

what is it you mean In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

Lately I've been thinking about painters Michelangelo, Boucher, Correggio, Tintoretto, Da Vinci, and others who chose to paint the myth of Leda and the Swan. Did any of them encounter difficulty when they thought about how they would represent the swan, which was not a mere swan but the incarnation of spirituality? How did they go about mixing the paints to get the precise shade of white that would be both swanlike and divine? Did any of the painters wonder at the force of the coupling, how it must have felt for mortal Leda? We know this question struck Yeats, whose sonnet "Leda and the Swan" is one of the best examples of how ekphrasis can create beautiful work.

For my exercise, I would like you to choose a painting or a sculpture that interests you. Sometimes, something you know too well isn't the best choice because there is less opportunity for discovery. If you'd like a suggestion, I can tell you that in my classes I have used La Pergola (The Trellis) by Silvestro Lega, with success. Its rich colors and many details (figures in the foreground, trees and landscape in the far distance, various expressions and possible stories) are useful because they present many opportunities for writers to imagine and to wonder.

Step One There are three sections to the poem you are writing. Section one: Write as a person within the painting. (If the painting is an abstract or a still life, you may write as an object or as the paint.) Section two: Now write as the painter. Section three: Now finally write as you, the poet, perceiving the art.

Step Two Which voice do you like best? Which voice gained the most knowledge, and which voice wonders the most (and do you prefer knowing to wondering)? Is there a subject emerging, one you didn't know about when you began? Determine if all three sections work together, or choose the one(s) that you think are promising, and revise the work to your vision. Sometimes I end up with a three-section poem, and sometimes I end up only focusing on one voice. Whatever is most interesting is the best way to go.

Best of luck!

Email your entries, with 'Poetry workshop' in the title field, to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk by midnight on Sunday October 15. The shortlisted poems, and Amy's responses, will appear on the site soon afterwards.